Top 40 Musical Universities in America: How Students Listen

This fall, millions of students are settling in at the universities where they’ll study, socialize, and prepare for their futures — and that includes discovering music they’ll listen to for the rest of their lives.

Maybe it’s all the fresh sounds encountered just as they’re learning new things and working out who they are, but for whatever reason, people tend to establish their music taste at college, and for that matter, during the adolescent to young adult years. The classic rock girl might discover vintage jazz, or the EDM enthusiast gravitate towards hip-hop, and everyone is exposed to lots of new music, no matter where they’re coming from.

Music accompanies much of the studying, socializing, and just about everything else that goes on at universities, so we wondered: Which are the most musical universities? And what does each of those schools listen to?

We found the schools whose students signed up for our student deal at the highest rates last semester, because that plan appeals to students who love music. Then, we ranked the schools where these listeners played the most songs, because people who love music listen a lot:

The map and list lead to individual pages for each school where you can really delve into the data.

“We saw quite a bit of diversity in listening behavior, especially in the distinctive tracks and artists that define a school’s taste,” said Lamere. “I was also really interested in getting insights into the sleep/wake cycles at these schools through music — it’s interesting that some schools stay up late, some get up early, and others do both, burning the candle at both ends as it were.”

Here are some observations. To be clear, these “distinctive” traits mean that a school listens to a song, artist, or genre disproportionately to the other schools. All of the schools showed plenty of variety; looking for distinctive traits makes their unique qualities stand out in relief.

In “the city that never sleeps,” listening patterns indicate that NYU students get an hour’s less sleep on average. They also listen to more slowcore and hipster music.

This graph shows early-morning listening spikes at Cornell.

Cornell University listening spikes at 6am and 7am (right). One possibility: its students wake up and exercise before class more than those at other schools.